Thanks for the reply.

To quote in the markup, you should surround the text to be quoted

text | without spaces, same for all of the markups. Spaces kill them.|

Let's see if I figured it out...

I agree that its not a "take down" of Kuhn, but I don't think its supposed to be.

Sure, but b_b thought it was a critique. More like an interesting portrait of a very difficult relationship.

I cannot understand the quote system here.

First time it eats up more than it should.

Second time it fails to produce the quote at all.

Not expecting much from a guy whose

research focuses primarily on the nature of positive professional duty

at a business school.

His answer to the crisis in philosophy and "restore" its "authority in the wider culture" is to

not change its name but engage more often with issues of contemporary concern — not so much as scientists but as guardians of reason. This might encourage the wider population to think more critically, that is, to become more philosophical.

While I agree with his doubts about renaming philosophy a science, somehow I'm not surprised an ethicist has concluded that we can avoid the crisis in philosophy with contemporary issues. It's unfortunately true that the less intelligent tend to take up applied ethics because it is practical and intuitively more accessible. He doesn't realize that reducing philosophy to the needs of the fickle reasoning public and corporate and institutional needs (ethics boards) is a capitulation to the crisis.

These are essentially conceptual clarifications. And as such, they are relatively timeless philosophical truths.

Socrates attacked contemporary reason because it was not timeless. Friedland wants to bring it because because it is "relatively timeless." The phrase "relatively timeless" has the air of "sorta true" or "kind of proven." So many philosophical wars have been waged on whether philosophy can provide timeless truths, that to merge them effortlessly together makes the author sound underpowered.

Again, the site tried to eat my content when I finally hit the add comment button. "Page expired!" Why is it so dangerous to post here?

Ok figured out editing and fixed my quotes.

A few comments to the architects of this site.

The reply system is unfriendly. Having to load up a separate page to make a reply is inconvenient. No way to edit replies. Markup is a bit clunky as you can see from my post. No way to collapse threads. Needs to be a bit smarter.

Also, and this is really important, when I first tried to make my reply, it ate all my content and said the page had expired! Do you put a timer on these things? A great way to kill off a thoughtful exchange. Thankfully I had copied my reply to the paste-buffer.

Looked at it. Not much there. Not a take down of Kuhn's philosophy.

| I asked him, “If paradigms are really incommensurable, how is history of science possible? Wouldn’t we be merely interpreting the past in the light of the present? Wouldn’t the past be inaccessible to us? Wouldn’t it be ‘incommensurable?’ ”

If two theories are incommensurable, it means they lack equivalence in terms. Mass in one theory will not mean mass in another theory. If they meant the same thing, you might be able to derive one theory from another. Instead, you have to interpret or translate between terms.

Add to this the idea that for a particular time, a particular world view will shape the way we understand and perceive things. For scientists, these world views will be scientific theories.

Kuhn's big idea was that because theories were incommensurate, theory change could not be rational. That is to say, scientists did not pick up this theory, then that one, and make an objective judgment. Instead, scientists grew up within the context of one theory, which provided a domain of scientific exploration, or paradigm, bounded by its assumptions. Regular science involves poking around in the concepts provided by the paradigm. Revolutionary science breaks the paradigm and offers something else. But when a new paradigm appears on the scene, the old guard have no access to it and its new concepts. New scientific theories rarely convince the old guard. Instead, the young pick it up as their paradigm, and start working from there.

But surely the experiments will prove one or the other is true, right? Not according to Kuhn. The problem is that each world view assumes different things to exist, along with different forces, different mathematics, and so on. Furthermore, you can't do experiments except from within a particular paradigm.

Finally, even if you could judge one theory superior on one point over another, who is to say that the losing theory would not be superior in the long run? In other words, how resilient should we be in the face of contrary evidence, when every theory faces contrary evidence? There is no hard and fast rule.

That gives you a rough outline of Kuhn's philosophy of science.

If you are interested in the philosophy of science, try the nice introductory reader Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues, Curd & Cover eds. W.W. Norton & Company, New York.

From this book, I'll make a few quotations from Laudan's "Dissecting the Holistic Picture."

Laudan attacks the idea of the paradigm as a holistic unit of scientific understanding, with a take-it-or-leave-it hard core that cannot be revised without "rejecting the entire world view."

| ...we solve the problem of consensus [of the scientific community] once we realize that the various components of a world view are individually negotiable and individually replaceable in a piecemeal fashion. (144)

He goes on to prove that it is conceivable, but then asks why theory change often appears so abrupt.

| ...only because our characterizations of such historical revolutions make us compress or telescope a number of gradual changes... in to what, at our distance in time, can easily appear as an abrupt and monumental shift. (146)

Laudan proposes a gradualist understanding of theory change, concluding that

| sociologists and philosophers of science who predicate their theories of scientific change and cognition on the presumed ubiquity of irresolvable standoffs between monolithic world views (of the sort that Kuhn describes in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) run the clear risk of failing to recognize the complex ways in which rival theories typically share important background assumptions in common. (155)

These shared background assumptions would act as

| enough common ground between rivals to engender hope of finding an "Archimedian standpoint" which can rationally mediate the choice.

That, my friends, is a critique of Kuhn. But you'd have to do some reading to decide whether it works.

Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues, Curd & Cover eds. W.W. Norton & Company, New York.